Anticipating China

David L. Hall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of a number of works, including Eros and Irony: A Prelude to Philosophical Anarchism; Thinking Through Confucius (with Roger T. Ames); The Arimaspian Eye (a philosophical novel); and Richard Rorty: Poet and Prophet of the New Pragmatism, all published by SUNY Press. Roger T. Ames is Professor of Philosophy and editor of Philosophy East and West. He is the author of The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Philosophical Thought; Thinking Through Confucius (with David L. Hall); co-editor of Nature in Asian Traditions; Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice; and Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, all published by SUNY Press.

"The extensive and masterful command of Western philosophy, including the contemporary period, makes the book truly exciting instead of just another competent scholarly study. The bold insight of the authors is mountain air. The pure artistry of the writing rushes readers along until they are stopped by the shock of finding Hall and Ames saying exactly the right thing to illuminate important areas of cultural concern in at least four areas. The treatment of pre-Socratic philosophy is not just a rehash, but offers new insights (so much so that I thought of using it as a text in Ancient Philosophy class). The material on ancient China enriches what the authors began to do in Thinking Through Confucius. The assessments of differences between China and the West often render contemporary Western philosophers in new, illuminating perspective. Finally, the book contributes fundamentally, instead of anecdotally, to the enterprise of seeking to understand contemporary Asia."I have been looking for this book for twenty years. In reading postmodern philosophers, I have often written in the margins the observation that 'this labored and over-wrought point is plain in Asian thinking.' I generally wondered how it was that scholars of the stature and imagination of Paul Tillich or Richard Rorty could be so scintillating and intelligent and yet be embarrassingly ignorant of anything Asian. Hall and Ames are leaders in systematically articulating the connections that many of us have vaguely felt, and looked for, and thought obvious in one or another instance."—John Rothfork

• (Abridged)AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Anticipating the Argument1. Clearing a Path to China2. Circles and Squares1. Squaring the Circle1. From Chaos to Cosmos2. Rest and Permanence3. The Watershed: Zeno and the Power of Paradox4. Counterdiscourse: Heraclitus and Anaxagors5. From Theoria to Theory6. Counterdiscourse: The Sophists7. Socrates and Plato: Eros and Its Ironies8. Aristotle: Four Beginnings of Thought9. Humanitas and the Imago Dei10. The Persistence of the Rational Ethos11. Counterdiscourse: Challenges to the Rational Ethos2. The Contingency of Culture1. The First and Second Problematics2. China and the First Problematic3. Comparing Comparative Methods4. Intercultural Vagueness3. Extending the Circle1. Acosmotic "Beginnings"2. Analogical Discource in the Confucian Analects3. Experiments in Rationalism4. The Emergence of Han Thinking5. The Dominance of Han Thinking6. A Closing AnticipationNotesBibliography of Works CitedIndex